Chamonix Town

Today was that traditional day in each holiday where we didn’t really do much. The weather was a bit iffy compared to previous days – a bit showery and grey – and we were all a bit pooped after a long day out yesterday.

Kas went out for a short run, then got home and went for a run with Ami, then got home and went for another run with Izzy. Meanwhile I sat in the apartment playing with photos and thinking about how to structure this set of blog posts. I lead such an exciting life.

By the time everyone was back home and cleaned up it was lunchtime. Or, it would have been if we’d had much in, but we didn’t. So we ate a few bits we’d got and then went out for a walk around town.

First of all we went to find the two remaining geocaches in town that I hadn’t yet found. They were easy, especially with four of us looking.

After this we walked up and down the main street looking for souvenirs and Ami bought herself a rather pretty panoramic photo of Mont Blanc.

We also kept passing this fantastic mural, which so far I’d not managed to photograph well, due to absence of daylight. Look at it very closely. The only parts that aren’t painted are the left hand pair of small windows. You can just make out the big glass doors at the bottom. That’s also a painted scene. In particular notice how the artist has painted the size and shape of the balconies to match exactly the real balconies on the front of the building, and how he or she also gives the impression of three dimensions by painting on the shadows.

I think the artist received a number of commissions here, because the outside wall of our apartment also had some similar work, in this case emphasizing that the cinema was inside.

As we were walking back towards our apartment we passed a little sandwich and burger stand on the main street which looked like it had a range of food options to suit us all, so we stopped for a bite. It was very good.

After this, it all went a bit freestyle. Ami had in her mind that she wanted to buy a jacket, but she couldn’t really articulate very well what kind of thing she was looking for, and because Chamonix is more of an outdoor sports kind of place it is fairly underpopulated when it comes to fashion stores. So we tried a bunch of places but Ami wasn’t really that interested. Most of the time I was doing my “bored shopping father” routine of standing outside, taking a few photos and looking at my watch. I’m a bad shopper.

Eventually Ami gave up trying and we walked back to the apartment and spent a chunk of the afternoon playing with our PCs. Later on in the evening Kas shot up to the supermarket with Izzy and grabbed a load of stuff to do pasta for tea, which I duly cooked with Kas’s assistance. And that was kind of all we did, apart from drinking more beer and watching the Olympics in French.